Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games book trilogy—readers’ famous escape from reality.
We have all likely heard of it. Similarly, we have likely seen the advertisements for the movie The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is an adaptation of the fourth book of the series. And if you haven’t yet read the book or seen the movie, you might want to first verify whether they’re worth your time and money.
The book: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel to the original The Hunger Games books, centering around Panem’s infamous President Snow. Why did Snow become evil? How did he come to power? Why is the Capitol so colorful and posh? Why did The Hunger Games become so vulgar? All of these questions are answered in this book. However, if you were a fan of the first three books and are wondering if the fourth one correlates directly with the storyline of the previous, the answer is no. Because this story takes place about six decades before the era of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, it doesn’t touch on their lives, but rather on the history of The Hunger Games themselves. In my opinion, this continuation of the already sufficient trilogy was not necessary—unless you are a reader who simply wishes to stay in the world of Panem just a little longer.
The movie: Is the movie a close interpretation of the book? I would say so. However, when evaluated on its own, the movie is quite anticlimactic in my opinion, which is also supported by its poor score of about 64% on rotten tomatoes. I felt that, although Coriolanus Snow’s actor Tom Blyth was a physically compatible match for the book character, on screen he seemed to be less charismatic than he should have been(even if in the book his charisma is pretentious to begin with). As for character Lucy Gray Baird’s actress Rachel Zegler, I felt that her acting was inorganic and therefore not believable.
In total, is the fourth part of The Hunger Games worth it? I believe that it may be in your best interest to either read the book or view the movie—not both; it’s simply not exciting enough for the audience. Its presence is also not crucial enough to the history of The Games, because it’s not difficult to imagine how psychopaths like Coriolanus Snow could manipulate their power for bad causes, as well as how marketing and gambling make events like The Hunger Games interesting for the audience.
